I love watching living things grow. I am fascinated by how beans sprout after being soaked in water. I get excited watching tadpoles growing legs and turning into frogs. I can spend hours watching silkworms methodically gnawing mulberry leaves and growing fatter each day, until they spin cocoons and eventually emerge as moths. Nowadays, as a pediatric specialist, I spend my working hours seeing newborn babies become toddlers, toddlers reach kindergarten age (and getting their shots), and grade school kids becoming teens over the years. As my patients reach the ripe old age of 18, I congratulate them for reaching the threshold of maturity, inquire of their future plans, and refer them, if necessary, to other doctors who will continue to provide them medical care during their adult years. Such send-off moments are often full of hope and excitement, as these youngsters look forward to college, work and whatever lies ahead. Becoming an adult seems like a good thing.
Unfortunately, some of my teen patients reach their 18th birthdays as alcoholics or drug addicts. Many have already been sexually active, and a few have precociously experienced pregnancy, abortion, parenthood, statutory rape and sexually transmitted diseases. Virtually all have already been exposed to pornography, and porn addiction likely is commonplace. Their paths toward maturation seem to have taken wrong turns, and much darkness is in their future.
Ironically, while we recognize a certain ideal of the adult person, i.e., one who is strong, knowledgeable, capable, loyal, loving, faithful, disciplined, respected and wise, the word “adult” often is used to describe something that is irreparably degenerate in nature. “Adults” are allowed to purchase tobacco and liquor. Adults are permitted to view movies that titillates with sounds and images of violence, filthy language, and sexual immorality. “Adult” books, magazines, toys and content celebrate extramarital and grotesque sex as something that is normal and commonplace. Children who are inadvertently exposed to adult content are grossed out and disturbed by it, as it shatters their ideal of what adults are like. Eventually, many grow up to become what they saw.
Science textbooks often contain diagrams of animal life cycles. For the lion, they would have drawings of a newborn lion, cubs in various stages of maturation, and a stately, beautiful adult lion in all its glory at the pinnacle. It would be unusual for the adult lion to appear diseased or wounded in the picture. I wonder how the diagram would look like for humans if someone from another world came and observed us. Would the “normal” adult be overweight, prone to addiction, violent, unfaithful and deceitful? Our growth and development in this world often parallels the descriptions in James:
“...but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when full-grown, gives birth to death.”
James 1:14-15
May we grow rightly by God's grace, and reach a different kind of maturity.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”
Galatians 5:22-23
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